He tried to jam the cell door to prevent guards from opening it and hanged himself with a bedsheet tied to a window, Fallon said.

Cugno says he thinks it's "fishy" that Hernandez would have killed himself when he was just acquitted of a 2012 double murder.

Officials said Hernandez was found hanging in his cell by corrections officers at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley around 3:05 a.m. He was pronounced dead an hour later at UMass Memorial Health Alliance in Leominster. Mr. Hernandez also attempted to block his door from the inside by jamming his door with various items.

The child molestation conviction of former Roman Catholic priest John Geoghan, a key figure in the clergy sex abuse scandal that rocked the Boston archdiocese, was vacated after he was beaten to death in 2003 in his cell at the same MA maximum-security prison. He was acquitted last week on a double homicide charges in the murders of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado.

Others emphasized that he was a convicted murderer who deserved no pity.

The Patriots, the Super Bowl champions, are scheduled to meet with President Donald Trump at the White House on Wednesday.

MA state police continue to investigate the death. The Patriots dismissed him from the team upon his arrest in August of 2013 in the Lloyd murder case.

August 27, 2012: Hernandez signs a five-year, $40 million contract with the Patriots. "Rather than have someone with that incomplete decision that they're guilty, the state chooses instead to say that conviction is abated - as if it never had happened".

A jogger found Lloyd's gunshot-riddled body in a MA industrial park less than a mile from Hernandez's home on June 17, 2013. Lloyd, a former friend who dated the sister of Hernandez's longtime fiancee, Shayanna Jenkins, was shot several times by the same kind of gun security footage showed Hernandez possessed.

Claude Pleon, a player for the New York Jets tweeted, "R.I.P Aaron Hernandez". "Right away I knew I wasn't going because it was something I thought about before we'd even won the game". "Today my heart hurts as I got the worse news I could have imagined".